Integrated Topological Planning and Scheduling for Orchestrating Large Human-Robot Collaborative Teams

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Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in industry is a promising research direction that has potential to expand robotics to previously unthinkable application areas. Orchestration of large hybrid human-robot teams carrying out many tasks in parallel within a shop floor faces new challenges due to unique aspects introduced by HRC. This paper presents a new approach to topological and temporal orchestration of hybrid human-robot workforce, considering the capabilities of robot agents as well as the potentially new roles that human operators may acquire in an HRC setting. We propose a two-stage approach to orchestrating large HRC teams: First, an abstract topological and task assignment problem is solved, which does not consider the precise sequence of tasks. Second, the result of the first step is used to initialize a constrained search for an efficient HRC schedule. Initial application of the proposed approach in problems of varying complexity demonstrates encouraging results.